The Rensselaer County Legislature voted to ban all kratom products Tuesday night — but the vote only came after a last minute debate.
WAMC's Maryam Ahmad sat down with Capital Region Bureau Chief Grant Ashley to discuss the vote and what it means for local and state governments that are figuring out how best to regulate the substance.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Maryam Ahmad: So, can you start by telling us a bit about what has been done at the state and federal level in the wake of nationwide concerns about kratom.
Grant Ashley: So New York State already bans kratom sales to people under 21 and requires consumer warning labels on products. And then there's been some movement at the Food and Drug Administration to look into regulating this over the years. They haven't taken really any firm action on it, so I think that's kind of why it's been left up to state and local governments to regulate. So Rensselaer County's law would ban all kratom products from being sold. The exception is for FDA-approved or doctor-prescribed kratom products. I do think it's worth noting that there are currently no FDA-approved kratom products, so that would essentially be a total ban on kratom sales in the county. The county is imposing a fine of $500 per item confiscated for the first time, $1,000 per item in the future, and they did leave open the possibility of criminal prosecutions. The law was sponsored by all 11 members of the county legislature's Republican majority, and they cited the dangers around kratom. The FDA has warned that its use can lead to liver toxicity, seizures, substance use disorder. Some people spoke out in favor of the ban at meetings before this, leading up to their final vote, and that included three mothers whose sons had kratom products in their systems when they died. And then people might remember the four children who were poisoned in Mechanicville in Saratoga County back in June. That was allegedly by their mother. The day before this meeting, WNYT reported that the children had kratom and Benadryl in their systems, and at least in the case of one county legislator, Robert Bayly, that was explicitly why he voted for this ban. He mentioned that before making his vote.
Bayly: After listening to the three ladies that were here last week that lost children, and then this week the news coming out that the four kids that were murdered in Mechanicville had Benadryl and kratom in their system. I will be voting no against the amendment, and I will be voting for the law as written.
Ahmad: So ahead of last night's legislature meeting, the county's kratom ban seemed like it was going to pass without much controversy. What happened?
Ashley: I would say the public comment period happened. So three people spoke against the kratom ban. Nobody supported it at this particular meeting. Again, people have spoken in favor of the ban before. I don't want to make it seem like no one is in favor of this. And their argument was basically there's two types of kratom products, right? There's products that use the kratom leaf in its more natural form, and then there's these synthetic products where they refine it and isolate this high potency 7 OH compound, and they all supported banning that synthetic stuff, but they wanted the more natural products to still be available for sale and use. So one of the people who spoke was a kratom industry lobbyist. Another was a mother who owns a retail store selling these products in Schenectady, and she said kratom was the only thing that helped her get over postpartum anxiety. And then the last person who spoke was David Spenziero. He lost his father and other people in his life to opioid overdoses, and he says outpatient programs and kratom have helped him recover from substance use disorder.
Spenziero: A blanket prohibition will not stop addiction. It simply hands a monopoly to the black market. An overbroad blanket ban threatens living survivors who are holding onto their stability with everything they have. It pulls the safety floor out from under working, self-reliant people, forcing them either toward the lethal street market or onto heavy lifelong pharmaceutical dependencies they fought so hard to avoid.
Ahmad: And how did the legislators respond to this?
Ashley: Most of them were, you know, at least seemingly unmoved. The exception was County Legislator Ken Zalewski, who's a Democrat. He proposed tabling the bill to make an exemption for natural leaf kratom. That's also the case in Dutchess County, they banned just the synthetic products and then let the more natural products remain. Zalewski, by his own admission, is kind of a weird person to be making this case. He said, I don't drink alcohol, I don't smoke. He never really has. He reluctantly takes ibuprofen. But he told me he heard from a lot of people who used that unrefined natural kratom leading up to and during the meeting, and that persuaded him to push for this exemption.
Zalewski: So I'm like, well, wait a second. Why would we want to ban something that's helping so many people? That defies logic. And you learn about the two different types, and that's when I said, "Well, of course, I support banning the bad stuff." You can't have people walking into gas stations, right? The gas station attendant is not your doctor or your pharmacist, right?
Ashley: So then he pushed to table the amendment. That failed. Then he proposed adding a sunset clause. The New York State Legislature passed a ban on synthetic kratom products. That's just waiting for Governor Kathy Hochul's signature, so he was saying maybe we should have this expire and let the state law take effect, and then that failed too. And then when they voted on the legislation, it passed 15-2. Zalewski and one of his Democratic colleagues were the only two legislators who voted against the ban.
Ahmad: As you mentioned, Rensselaer County isn't alone in trying to regulate kratom. Dutchess County has banned synthetic kratom products, and New York State could ban them as well. Albany County, Massachusetts and Vermont have also banned all kratom products. How does Rensselaer County's ban fit into this?
Ashley: So I think right now, different local and state governments are going to have to figure out how to regulate this substance. The numbers on how many people use kratom are a little bit rough, but a University of Michigan study put that number of users at 5 million nationwide, and they say that number is growing. And so these are the discussions that people are going to be having across the Northeast and across the country, right? What do we ban? What do we regulate, and why?
Ahmad: That was WAMC's Capital Region Bureau Chief Grant Ashley reporting. Thank you, Grant.
Ashley: Thank you.
